US Imperialist law enforcement think it unlikely that that glorious North Korean cyber warriors’ were behind the righteous hack of Sony servers.

It is widely credited that Kim Jong-un personally hacked Sony systems, ably aided by his hand-picked teams of hackers. Kim was mortified by a Sony movie which was based around an assassination plot against him.

However a senior FBI official said on Tuesday that the agency has not confirmed widely held suspicions that North Korea is behind the unprecedented cyber-attack on Sony's Hollywood studio.

"There is no attribution to North Korea at this point," Joe Demarest, assistant director with the Federal Bureau of Investigation's cyber division, said while speaking on a panel at a cybersecurity conference sponsored by Bloomberg Government.

Cybersecurity researchers who have analyzed the malicious software used in the attack say that technical indicators suggest North Korean hackers launched the attack. People close to separate investigations being conducted by Sony and the government have told Reuters that North Korea is a principal suspect, yet a North Korean diplomat has denied that his nation is involved.

Hackers stole vast quantities of data, then used malicious software to wipe data on computers, shutting down much of the Sony unit's network for more than a week.

The untouchables have swooped on a US school and taken the Los Angeles Unified School District for records pertaining to its $1 billion iPad project as part of a federal grand jury probe.

The Apple project has been plagued with problems since its rollout last year. The requested records include proposal-scoring documents, review committee files and employee information, among other materials. The district's Common Core Technology Project aimed to provide 21st century learning devices to all of the district's 650,000 students, chipping away at the technology divide that often leaves lower-income students at a disadvantage from their more affluent peers.

The question was why the hell they were using Apple gear. The school board was told that Apple was the cheapest and the best quality by school’s superintendent John Deasy and they never thought to question it. However it turned out that Deasy was a big Apple fanboy and had $7,793.70 worth of Apple shares in the outfit. He also had carried out promotional videos for Jobs’ Mob a year before the bidding and appeared to have given them the inside leg measurement of the spec.

The district used a scoring system based on factors other than price to eliminate most of the teams competing with Apple. It might have been ok if the expensive Apple gear had worked. But its “super sophisticated” security software was by-passed in minutes. Ariel Neuman, a former federal prosecutor, said the government is likely investigating possible fraud involving the contracts.

"If someone doesn't disclose a relationship they have with Apple," he said, "those could be material omissions that could lead to a wire or mail fraud case."

Microsoft and the FBI have launched a major assault on one of the world's biggest cyber crime rings.

The outfit runs the Citadel Botnets and is believed to have stolen more than $500 million from bank accounts over the past 18 months. Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit took down at least 1,000 of an estimated 1,400 malicious computer networks known as the Citadel Botnets.

Citadel was found on five million PCs around the world and, according to Microsoft. It was used to steal from American Express, Bank of America, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, eBay's PayPal, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, Royal Bank of Canada and Wells Fargo. So far no one is certain of the identities of the owners of the botnet, but Microsoft hopes that taking their toys off them will really harm the crime ring’s business plan.

Citadel is one of the biggest botnets in operation today. Microsoft said its creator bundled the software with pirated versions of Windows, and used it to control PCs in the United States, Western Europe, Hong Kong, India and Australia. The FBI is working closely with Europol and other overseas authorities to try to capture the unknown criminals and it has obtained search warrants as part of what it dubbed a "fairly advanced" criminal probe.

It has been reported that 28 year old Hector Xavier Monsegur, a.k.a. Sabu, the alleged leader of LulzSec, was actually an FBI informer. Apparently, he was working for FBI for at least six months and managed to help FBI charge five other hackers.

LulzSec is an offshoot of Anonymous that starred in many attacks throughout 2011. Among its victims are politicians, the US Department of Justice, Visa, Mastercard, Rupert Murdoch’s empire, Stratfor, Irish party Fine Gael, etc.

It turned out that Sabo had been charged with 12 counts and secretly pleaded guilty to the charges on August 15, 2011. Had he been found guilty, he’d face a sentence up to some 124 years in the can. However, Sabo denied it at the time.

FBI’s documents revealed that a snitch called CW was “acting under the direction of the FBI” and helped speed up the leak of a conference call between the FBI and UK’s Serious and Organized Crime Agency. Another document claims that he facilitated the release of emails nicked from Stratfor that are now being published by Wikileaks, all while under the FBI’s thumb. Naturally this gives way to many other questions.

FBI seems to be quite happy about it, as it claims that it chopped off the organization’s head. On the other hand, security firms warn that this could trigger yet another wave of attacks by angered hackers. We however can’t stop thinking how the story is strangely reminiscent of 1984, as opposed to the V for Vendetta scenario romantically envisioned by some.

Actress Scarlett Johansson has called in the FBI to investigate how nude photos of her were hacked from her mobile phone. The snaps of the 26-year-old actress, which were taken by her were leaked on a website yesterday.

What is worrying the FBI is that there is a phone-hacking ring thought to be responsible for stealing naked photos and videos from at least 50 female Hollywood celebrities. Other stars reportedly targeted include actresses Jessica Alba, Vanessa Hudgens, Selena Gomez and Miley Cyrus, as well as singer Christina Aguilera.

Bloggers have linked the leaks to a hacking group called Anonymous that has boasted of targeting celebrities. Mila Kunis has also been hacked and a shirtless snap of Justin Timberlake which she had on her phone was taken. One snap showed Timberlake wearing pink underwear on his head while there is another reported to be a separate explicit shot of an unidentified bloke.

One of the World's worst dates, Julian Assange has claimed that the FBI had tried to bribe the outfit's staff. Like many of Assange's comments he did not provide any evidence so we guess we will have to wait for a whistle-blower in the FBI to tell us what it did.

Assange threatened to break controversial super-injunctions if the details were leaked to him. He published details of “five or six” super-injunctions in the past. However, in a bizarre moment, he admitted that Wikileaks might resort to a super-injunction itself in order to protect its sources.

He accused the British public of an annoying middle-class squeamishness over the publication of secret cables and documents and would rather destroy a revolution rather than have something leaked . He insisted that he had seen no evidence that anyone had lost their lives as a result of Wikileaks disclosures, despite Government warnings that this would happen.

Opening up societies around the world may mean fatalities are a price worth paying, he said.

The Untouchables have swooped on the homes of people suspected of being members of Anonymous.

More than 40 search warrants were executed across the United States on Thursday, the bureau announced. This follows the arrest in the UK of five men who allegedly participated in the Anonymous group’s denial of service attacks on Visa, Mastercard, Paypal and Amazon in mid-December.

Anonymous said its attacks were to punish financial-service companies’ who prohibited donations to Wikileaks. Amazon was also targeted after it kicked Wikileaks off its web-hosting service.

The FBI seems to want to make an example of those who conduct DDoS attacks. They say that it is punishable by up to 10 years in prison, as well as exposing participants to significant civil liability,” the FBI said in a press release.

However the Untouchables did not seem to arrest anyone after the searches.

A bloke who discovered a software glitch in a one armed bandit machine and used it to clean up in a a western Pennsylvania casino has been arrested by the untouchables. Andre Nestor, 39, was arrested this week after he arrived at the Washington County Courthouse for jury selection.

He was charged with 650 counts of theft, criminal conspiracy, computer trespassing and other charges involving the Meadows Racetrack and Casino. The FBI claims that Nestor and two others caused a high-bet slot machine at the casino to generate false jackpots in 2009 all up Nestor is believed to have taken home about $1 million at casinos.

However Nester claims that he is being arrested for for winning on a slot machine,". He said that the surveillance tapes will show that he pressed buttons on the machine on the casino and won. The FBI will probably claim that he discovered that certain button combinations caused the machine to react in a particular way. It will be interesting to see how the coppers prove that is illegal as he did not actually break into the machines software.

The two men accused in the Washington County case with Nestor have pleaded guilty. Kerry Laverde, 51, pleaded guilty to three counts of receiving stolen property. Patrick Loushil, 42, had previously pleaded guilty in the case and had been expected to testify against Nestor at his Pennsylvania trial.

An insider trading probe targeting executives and consultants in several companies has resulted in serious charges against two TSMC and AMD executives in the US.

The FBI and the US Attorney's Office are currently conducting a wide ranging investigation and several subpoenas have already been filed against executives suspected of shady trading practices.

The charges center on TSMC's business development manager Manosha Kaurnatilaka, who allegedly provided confidential information to Primary Global Research, which distributed the confidential information to investors. Kaurnatilaka received $35,000 in return for his services. According to Reuters, Kaurnatilaka was contacted by the FBI a few months ago and asked to cooperate in the investigation.

Flextronics business development Director Walter Shimoon and Primary Global Research executive James Fleishman were also charged for their involvement. Fleishman was arrested on fraud and conspiracy charges.

The US government has ordered its CSI teams to stop looking for missing people and concentrate on finding movie pirates. According to Techcrunch the FBI has consciously decided to give such cases lower priority in the FBI's laboratory, which is used to look at DNA evidence.

While the FBI looks for proof of movie and MP3 downloading apparent there has been a massive backlog in missing persons cases. Often these end up being murder inquiries once the labs have reported that a missing person is probably buried in the back of someone's garden somewhere.

A new report from the Justice Department's Inspector General notes that this has serious consequences for other cases. Some people are sitting in jail waiting for DNA evidence that they have not murdered someone who has actually run off with a sailor and not told anyone. It can adversely affect families of missing persons waiting for positive identification of remains.